Man in the Empty Suit (5 page)

“Why?”

Yellow stared past me, no pity in his eyes now, only disgust and judgment. “It’s sitting beside me.”

The answer sat on the stool on Yellow’s other side. The Drunk. His odor was immense, a mix of alcohol and urine. He was one you didn’t look at or talk to. He was given wide berth in the halls. The Drunk was avoided, misremembered, blamed. I looked at him closely for the first time in years and drew in a sharp breath, which I instantly regretted for the vapors rising from him. Several things I noticed surprised me. His clothes were the same suit I was wearing, redesigned by filth. Under his beard and grime, he wasn’t as old as I’d always thought. He was young, barely older than me. Perhaps only a year or two older.

“God.” I realized what Yellow was leading me to.

“Yes.”

“He’s the survivor?”

“And he doesn’t remember a fucking thing. He’s useless.”

“So what happened? What creates the paradox?”

“Believe me, that’s the major topic of discussion among everyone older than you. That and sex, the fucking perverts.”

No stranger to self-judgment—especially regarding sex, particularly when engaged in the act, coupled or solo—I couldn’t recall such strong admonition. I chanced a glance at Yellow’s downturned mouth. “Does that lovely sweater come with a vow of celibacy?”

I’m sure he wanted to protest, but instead he waited for me to hold up a hand and mutter an apology. I offered it without feeling any genuine remorse, and both of us knew it.

Around the room the age clusters were very pronounced, as if a form of segregation were taking place. Everyone older than me drifted toward one side of the room, away from the door, near the empty stage where a single turntable played music—The Fifth Dimension, mostly. Elders took turns flipping the albums over when they reached the end. When I was in my twenties, the Elders had seemed decrepit, barely there and reeking of their inability to digest the food or drink properly, their clothes more and more worn, more repetitive. I’d avoided them, uncertain at what point I would cross that line into not caring how I presented myself, at what point not combing my hair or arriving in slept-in clothes became preferable to making even the smallest effort. Now, as I sat with Yellow, I was struck by how familiar—how comfortable—they had become.

At the other end clustered younger selves, who as of this moment all struck me as childish, even those in their thirties. Every table was covered with too many glasses of alcohol.
My life’s drinking phases were plainly visible: There was my beer table, my fruity-mixed-drink stage. The table nearest me, around which some mid-thirty-year-olds sat, illustrated my current crutch. Straight liquor on the rocks. Glasses of diluted alcohol in shades of golden brown.

Yellow leaned closer to me. “Notice anything?”

It was easy to see now. Impossible to miss, really, and I wondered how it hadn’t occurred to me before. Most everyone older than me was sober. There were a few drinks on a few tables here and there, but they could just as easily have been soda as anything hard. “There’s very little conversation.”

“Actually, there’s quite a lot. But it’s all the same. Constant speculation. Constant attempts to put the pieces together.”

That there were so many Elders hinted at my potential success, but the tired, watery eyes, the skin patched with age spots, the bent backs and dry coughs that echoed my memories of my grandfather—these delivered a sense of inevitable failure. Regardless of outcome, my future was the chatter of birds in a graveyard, the worry of men mourning themselves, a conversation about their pursuits and failures, the sad and sadly sober discussion of my mortality. If there hadn’t been one in my hand, I would have needed a drink. “What have we got so far?”

“Nothing other than that it’s up to you.”

“How many dozens of us, and that’s all we’ve figured out?”

“You’re the last one before it happens. When you come back next year, that’s it. You’re on one side of the event. We’re on the other. We can speculate, but other than that.…”

“But surely you can tell me—”

“We’ve all discussed this quite a bit. I’m afraid we’re going to have to follow our memories’ lead and not let you know what we discussed. It might tip things.”

My fingers tapped the bar. His, too, in the same impatient rhythm.

I said, “That fucking stinks.” What a time for me to suddenly gain some backbone about my own rules. “So when it really matters, when death is on the line, you decide to stick your thumb in your mouth and suck?” A pack of teens howled past, one bumping into me. I reached behind me and pulled a sign off my back. Crude letters spelled LOSER. I crumpled it and tossed it on the bar. “Is it just me?” I asked. “Or were they younger than the Inventor?” It worried me.

Yellow looked after the group with the same concern I felt. “I don’t know.” I could tell he would be following up. “When it matters most is when rules need to be enforced most.” Yellow looked at me with a straight face for a second and then laughed. “I know. Sounds trite.”

I shook my head. “So where do I start?”

“Seventy told me to pass on one piece of advice. Keep an eye on that door.”

His thumb jerked toward a door near the bar, one of the kitchen entrances. I tugged at my drink as Yellow shuffled out of his seat and patted me on the back. “Good luck.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” He was no help. “So I just sit here and stare at the door?”

He started walking toward the stage. The record was skipping, and with increasing panic the Fifth Dimension repeated a promise to fly up and away in a balloon. As I watched Yellow fiddle with the record player, the Drunk took his opportunity
to slide one seat closer. By the time I realized he was moving in, it was too late. He had me. His silence and blank stare made me assume he was in the midst of a tremendous blackout. Once he was closer, his eyes regained some focus. He brought a very full glass with him and placed a hand over the mouth, then laid his head down on his hand, as if it were a pillow. I pretended not to see him.

“Not enough women at this thing.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “I guess that’s the truth.”

The Drunk smiled up at me. “You have no idea what’s coming.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know.” His eyes darkened, sobered for just a moment, and then they closed. When they reopened, they rolled as before. He pointed at the bottle of twelve-year-old whiskey, which was just within reach. “You’ll want to refill the flask.”

I took hold of the bottle. “You would know.”

He chuckled at that. I was surprised at my own revulsion toward him. He was, of course, me. But I’d always stayed away from him, as if he were contagious. Even just the previous year when I’d spoken to him in the hall, it had taken effort. This puzzled me now. I could see through the beard, the dirt. It was my face.

I carefully poured scotch from bottle to flask. It sounded like someone urinating into a cup.

He closed his eyes. “Wake me when she gets here.”

“What? Who?”

At that moment the door beside the bar opened, and in walked a woman. She was tall and pale, a tight red dress hugging her figure and revealing just enough of a tattoo that
wound down her left arm—interlocking parrots, nesting, staring, raising their wings. They looked so alive I could practically hear their voices. Brown hair fell around the woman’s face in large curls; green eyes ignored the room. I spilled whiskey over my hand and onto the bar.

The Brats scampered toward me. “Liquor spill, liquor spill.” One of them shouted, “Lick her spiel,” to the amusement of no one.

I put the bottle down and leaned back as the Brats swiped white towels. One knocked into the bottle, which almost toppled over. With deft ability another caught it against his wrist and righted it. They mopped up the spill and squeezed out the towels into tumblers.

I held my flask before me; whiskey dripped onto my suit, and I stared at the woman. Unsure of how I could have missed her during all my previous visits to the hotel, I watched the way she flowed around the tables. She was as incongruous as a flame in an ice cube. Around me packs of teens chased one another with cups of water and utensils. Card games sprouted here and there among the twenty-somethings. Their favorite was a memory game where a younger self sits with a deck, flips up one card after another as Elders try to recall the order. Everyone younger than me was occupied with self-amusement. It suddenly seemed like so much masturbation.

One of the Youngsters behind the bar held out a folded paper to me, soaked with whiskey, ink bleeding through. “Is this yours?”

I took it and read the message through the wet cover, words typed with a dying ribbon:
“If it’s dark, I’m gone.”

“No,” I said, and dropped it to the bar to float on the spilled liquor.

“Must be mine,” muttered the Drunk, who fished it out of the tiny puddle and pocketed the note without bothering to read it, a desperate awkwardness in his grasp.

He was focused on the woman, and silent, as were all those older than me. I realized then that Elders had stationed themselves so that they could vicariously relive the vision. Smiles were sprinkled around the tables, and all conversation had ceased.

Seventy followed her into the room. His hand snaked under her tattooed arm and around her waist, comfortable, if somewhat arthritic, and he steered her to a septuagenarian-occupied table in the corner behind the bar. I wondered if I might have hired a nurse. Perhaps not a bad precaution.

The Drunk closed his eyes and sighed as if ready for sleep. “Check out the nose.”

“What? Yes, it’s very attractive.”

“Not hers. Yours. Don’t forget to check it out.” He took his glass, a swirling mess of brownish gold and ice with a piece of napkin in it, splashed some at his mouth, and then stepped sloppily from his chair. “I gotta run. It’s about to happen, and I want to see how it all goes if I don’t do something about it.”

I’d reclaimed my revulsion of him. He made no sense. Yellow was right. He was useless. After he’d stepped away from the bar, I looked for the woman. She sat at a table with two others, Seventy and one slightly younger, who watched her with wet eyes. She said something inaudible and reached out to stroke his arm. I did, in fact, look at her nose. It sat on her face in just the right place and at just the right angle. She
turned back to Seventy. He leaned in close to her, and she gripped his wrist. At first I thought she was tickling his arm but finally realized they were looking at the place on his wrist where Sober had revealed a tattoo. The woman’s eyes were dark and wet, and they seemed near tears. She nodded, he patted her arm, and then he pulled his cuff over what they’d been examining with such tender fingers.

When I could look away, I spotted the Drunk’s glass, napkin bits floating inside. His mumbled exit replayed in my head. Drink lifted almost to my mouth, I froze. I was about to break and not break my nose outside the restroom. That must have been what he’d referred to. I rushed to cross the ballroom to the exit near the restrooms. I stopped halfway, turned in place, and wondered if I was really about to leave a room with a stunning woman I’d never seen before just so I could witness myself do something stupid. At a nearby table, an Elder in a double-breasted tailcoat with wide cuffs and a matching high collar of velvet, looking like a French aristocrat in a low-lit brothel, winked at me and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll watch her for you.”

I knew he would.

Through the crowd beyond the doorway, I could see the Pilaf Brothers and the Nose Savior waiting in the line to the men’s room. I stopped and watched. Pilaf Brothers, first one, then all three, turned to look at me and laughed, eyes full of serious recognition. I’d never noticed that all three of them wore slightly similar ponchos, like gauchos, one clearly still dusty from some South American trail, and I wondered if they rode around as some kind of trio. They put the plates down. They weren’t casual. This wasn’t pleasant. They were
burdened by necessity, a gravity to what they did. The air quivered with it. Rice sprinkled the carpet like fleeing maggots.

They walked away, glanced at me over their shoulders, muttered Spanish floating through the air, and I watched now as my slightly younger self debated over the plates. All it would take was the subtle kick. Eyes locked on the sliced almonds on the floor. He was about to do it. For an instant I thought I ought to stop him. My nose would break again, but I would recall the act of stopping what had once happened. In essence I would have three true and parallel memories, and I could barely handle the two I had at the moment. I needed to debate this with someone. Where was the Drunk? All the other Elders were leaving me on my own, but he had been willing to give advice. Repulsive and helpful was better than nothing.

The Savior moved the plate aside. An instant later Nose, wrapped in his red-and-black hanfu, stepped from the bathroom and tripped lightly at the edge of the rug. He wasn’t helped by his wooden sandals. Nose turned and looked over his shoulder. Savior watched him; recognition dawned that he’d spared only the break but not the memory of the pain. I watched his memory twin as he recalled both breaking and not breaking his nose.

At the other end of the hall, a cackle and a shout. “I told you I could barely remember it.” The Drunk. I tried to see him through the swarming Youngsters, could make out only his back as he charged away through the crowd. He’d wanted me here. Something needed to be discovered. He wasn’t simply giving tips, he worked toward a goal. Another game run by another Elder. I stepped forward. The Drunk
had suggested I look at the nose. I took hold of Nose’s shoulders.

“Pardon me?” He pulled back a moment, as if I weren’t holding my own face, as if there were something untoward in holding oneself against a wall and grasping for a body part. His skin was slick with sweat, and he smelled like the toilet he’d just thrown up in. His eyes showed he’d been crying. I didn’t recall that, ignored the reasons he might have cried and the reasons I would have forgotten.

“Let me see your nose a moment.”

“Get your hands off me.”

“I don’t want to overstate things, but this could mean life or death.”